I need to make a few small, simple 2d educational games primarily to help kids improve their reading. Drag & drop/matching words with pictures, spelling out words as well as maybe a scrolling shooter and some other things too. I also need these to run on multiple platforms (namely windows, osx, ipads and android).
If I do this with java (which I don’t currently know), is it possible to use the same code to create versions compatible with the above-mentioned platforms?
A Java application works on any common desktop operating system.
Android applications are written in Java, but are structured very differently than normal desktop applications. Also, most standard Java GUI toolkits aren't supported by Android. So porting to Android will require much more work than just clicking a button.
On iOS, Java isn't supported at all.
Did you consider building your game as a web application? Every device nowadays has a web browser which can execute Javascript, so you can't get much more plattform-independent than that.
